Monday, June 26, 2017

The Osamu Tezuka Story

The Osamu Tezuka Story

Toshio Ban and Tezuka
Productions

translated by Frederik L.
Schodt

Stone Bridge Press, 2016

The Osamu Tezuka Story is,
like Tezuka's body of work, a gigantic, awe-inspiring thing that both
stuns and entertains. Part corporate/pop cultural history, part
struggle of the artist as a young, middle-aged, and older manga-ka,
the book delivers four decades of the manga publishing world and the
life of its most popular creator, whose work impacted Japan and the
world. As a bonus this book and its 900 pages also deliver a great
upper body workout. Because... it's big.

Anyone interested in
Japanese comics or animation knows Tezuka's name. Convenient Western
shorthand casts him as Japan's Walt Disney, a protean creator of
world-renowned characters who dragged an artform into a licenseable,
immensely profitable future; but he combined Disney's innate grasp of
public taste with an inhuman work ethic and a fiercely competitive
drive to excel. English-language material about manga's early days is
rare, apart from Ryan Holmberg's deep-dive work at TCJ, and Western
fans rely on getting bits and pieces of history sideways through old
fanzine articles and questionable anime blogs informed by
half-remembered nerd conversations. Discussions about Tezuka usually
involve some self-appointed expert claiming Tezuka invented manga (he
did not), or Tezuka invented anime (he did not) or that Astro Boy was
the first animated TV show in Japan (it was not) or that the first
shoujo manga was Tezuka's Princess Knight (nope). Hopefully this book
will nip future tall-tale-tellers in the bud, because the truth
behind Osamu Tezuka's genius is vastly more interesting than any
fakey list of 'firsts.'

color Astro Boy/Tetsuwan Atomu splash page from Sept. 1965 Shonen

Readers already familiar
with Tezuka's exports like Astro Boy, Kimba The White Lion, Black Jack, Adolf, and Phoenix will enjoy seeing the creative struggles
behind their favorites, and if they weren't already aware of the
punishing demands of a professional manga artist, Tezuka's tireless
pace and unstoppable mania for creation will dumbfound. The Osamu
Tezuka Story details how habits of hard work were fostered early in
Tezuka's life. The Osaka-born Tezuka found inspiration in the
discipline of long distance running, a lifelong passion for music,
movies, and insect collecting, and a love of cartooning encouraged by
the adults in his life. The demands of Japan's wartime culture would,
in Tezuka, result in an amazing ability to focus on tasks and
maximize his own effectiveness, to juggle several different
challenges at the same time, and to deliver results in widely
disparate fields – talents that would serve him well in surviving the
rigors of the immediate postwar period, breaking into the
children's manga field and, at the same time, interning as a
medical doctor. Try it sometime, kids.

Choosing comics, Tezuka
found himself in the center of a postwar children's magazine boom.
Tezuka's Shin Takarajima, or "New Treasure Island", created
with Shichima Sakai, would be a breakout hit for Tezuka. The 50s
manga explosion produced an entire generation of young manga artists,
battling their punishing schedules and occasionally relieving stress
with three-day blowouts. Future manga stars like Shotaro Ishinomori,
Fujiko-Fujio, Fujio Akatsuka, and Leiji Matsumoto appear in Tezuka's
orbit as young hopefuls. Did Tezuka give his young manga acolytes
aphrodisiacs to fuel their late-night manga sessions? Read the book
and find out!

A popular talent feeding the
pop culture needs of millions of Japanese children, Tezuka would find
himself working on eight stories for eight different publishers
simultaneously. Editors would haunt Tezuka's foyer fighting for
priority, sometimes confining him to a hotel or, failing that, forced
to track him down from place to place to beg for pages. Tezuka's
organizational skills allowed him to direct production teams, with
Tezuka outworking even his most dedicated assistants, and he
developed a complex system to indicate to assistants the kinds of
crosshatching, shading, backgrounds or environmental effects for each
panel. He could direct the composition of manga pages from another
room or, as communications technology improved, from another city
entirely.

The late 1950s appearance of
more adult "gekiga" manga challenged the competitive Tezuka
to create works with more adult themes and a more realistic art
style. At the same time he was working with Toei Animation on the
feature length Son Goku film Saiyuki ("Journey To The West",
known in America as "Alakazam The Great"). Soon Tezuka was
pouring his manga profits into his other love, animation.

By 1960 Tezuka had developed
a production system for working with assistants and editors, had
completed his doctoral thesis, had written a live-action TV show, and
was embarking on his own animation production, with facilities
purpose-built into his new home. Showa-era anime buffs will be
interested in the production details of Astro Boy and early shorts
like "Drop" and "Pictures At An Exhibition", and
fascinated by Tezuka's cost-cutting animation choices, choices that
are still felt today. Tezuka's obsessive filmgoing paid dividends as
he utilized cinematic techniques like montage and cross-cutting to
inexpensively and quickly emphasize drama. His already overstuffed
work schedule became even more hectic; story conferences would be
informal, Stan Lee-style verbal exchanges where Tezuka would describe
the plot and the main visuals, leaving the layout & genga for
staff artists to complete. This would expand to a shift system that
worked around the clock. His corporate structure split and split
again, with one company handling his TV animation, one company
handling his licencing, and one for his manga publishing.

early 1960s hardback "White Pilot"

Tezuka's kingdom would, like
the rest of us, be battered by the shocks of the 70s. The decade
would see his animation studio go bankrupt and Tezuka struggle for
creative relevance in the face of personal and professional crisis,
leading him to innovate new manga for children and adults and make
global connections that will take him to China, Europe, and Los
Angeles' nascent Cartoon/Fantasy Organization. Tezuka's animation
would rebound, inaugurating a series of yearly TV specials for NHK
and production on experimental, artistic works. Sequestering himself
in a private studio, the decade saw Tezuka working harder than ever,
inspired by deadlines and pressure yet never abandoning his
painstaking attention to detail. Anime fans will appreciate the
research and technical challenges he and animator Junji Kobayashi
faced in creating the opening scene from his film Phoenix 2772, a
dramatic "one-take" shot of differing camera angles and
perspectives that took two full months. Kobayashi would later be
instrumental in creating Tezuka's award-winning 1984 masterpiece,
"Jumping."

Phoenix 2772's transforming robot love interest, Olga

Throughout the 1980s Tezuka
continued his Phoenix manga, pushed ahead with new manga like Adolph,
Neo-Faust, and Ludwig B, visited France and Brazil, produced a new
color Astro Boy TV series, achieved animation awards and manga
awards, and continued his all-nighters and his deadline struggles up
to and through his increasing health problems. Osamu Tezuka would
pass away in 1989 at the age of 60, an age that these days seems far
too young. However, in those sixty years he filled every day to the
fullest, leaving a life's work unmatched in any field, a life's work
the 900 pages of The Osamu Tezuka Story can only begin to describe.

Toshio Ban's artwork is
friendly, clean, photo-referenced to the hilt (some of the original
photos can be seen in Helen McCarthy's excellent The Art Of Osamu Tezuka), and close to Tezuka's own style but not so close that the
bits of Tezuka's own work seen occasionally don't stand out as wildly
individualistic. The Osamu Tezuka Story proves Tezuka's own thesis
of the universality of cartooning as a visual language, reminding us
all of the vast market for educational, vocational, historical, and
otherwise informational comics, a market that Japan has embraced
wholeheartedly while the rest of the world makes do with Ikea
assembly guides and comics about military courtesy or Dagwood's
mental health problems.

Frederik Schodt's adaptation
grapples with entire lifetimes and cultures, world wars, Japanese
educational and medical institutions, the ins and outs of the manga
industry, right down to specific animation techniques and obscure
Japanese insects, yet never fails to keep the material relevant,
interesting, and accessible to the general reader. Schodt served as
Tezuka's translator on some of his American visits, giving us the
unique situation where a translator is translating scenes of himself
translating. Time really is a flat circle, I guess.

Every once in awhile the
book feels the need to emphasize Tezuka's genius by describing his
otherworldly excellence in fields unrelated to manga; astounding
onlookers by mastering "extremely difficult scores" without
any formal piano training, memorizing phone numbers, dictating
telegrams, comprehending highly specialized texts, and caricaturing
classmates from memory. Listing these prosaic "achievements"
only adds a hagiographic tone to the text, and anyway, they're
completely overshadowed by the tremendous achievements Tezuka
actually did achieve in his actual recorded career.

Published as it is by Tezuka
Productions, The Osamu Tezuka Story has a definite focus on the
positive. The bankruptcies of Mushi Productions and Mushi Pro Shoji
in the 1970s are mentioned but explanations are vague; the copyright
disputes that kept Astro Boy out of the public eye for years are only
touched on briefly, and some misfires - like the 1950s live action
Astro Boy TV series that Tezuka later briefly pretended didn't exist
- are not mentioned at all. And while some readers may at times want
a franker, more candid account of Tezuka's life, let's face it, that
isn't what corporate biographies are about; "Tokiwaso Babylon"
this ain't.

What The Osamu Tezuka Story
is, is a comprehensive look at the life of someone who always worked
harder, who always thought he could do better, who was surrounded by
amazing talent and used that rivalry to spur himself to greater
efforts. It's the life of a man who survived war and occupation and
disease and who lived to create, every minute of every day. A man
who built studios and empires and tore them down and built them up
again, because he never stopped creating. A man who could tell you
the names of the stars in the sky and the names of the bugs in the
dirt, and then stay up for three days drawing comics, because that
was what he was, a creator.

28 years after his passing,
his work remains popular and influential as reissues, remakes, and
new visions bring his characters back to life. Western audiences have
enjoyed their own Tezuka boom with his manga appearing here in ever
increasing numbers. And with The Osamu Tezuka Story in English, we
can more fully understand every part of Tezuka's boundless genius.